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times more neurotic and entrenched. I had no trouble experiencing shame; during my childhood, I had felt that feeling every day for years. It was totally conscious, totally explicable. What was controlling my life was an unconscious excessive desire to be accepted, under any circumstances, into a group of males I saw as peers. As an adult, I recalled the shame but I had to go beyond that, to activate that original emotion of desperation, as a child, which was always satisfied when I was eventually accepted on to the team.

On this occasion, once I had become aware of that feeling of desper-
ation to be accepted, I quietly acknowledged it and put it back into its context: "I want to join you. I can play football. I want to be a part. Let me in." And, once I had done that, my neurotic need to have a centrestage role in male drinking camaraderie was gone.

Time to leave the marriage
Michael came to see me for psychotherapy because of concerns about his marriage to Lynette. "We had a long difficult patch but just lately we've been getting on really well again, almost like when we first met. We are best friends; we do lots together; we laugh together. But then Lynette will start haranguing me about something, and I get this extremely strong feeling that I should just walk out on the marriage. It's quite a shockingly strong feeling and it knocks me for six. I’m wondering if, underneath it all, it’s a marriage that's going nowhere and I should get out of it now, before there are any kids."

In the course of our session, I asked Michael if he could recall the last time that he had had this strong feeling and he had no difficulty in doing so. Just two days previously, he and his wife had been enjoying a weekend away. They were feeling exceptionally close to each other and had just got ready to go out to dinner when Lynette received a phone call from her nephew. She had listened for a moment and then said, "Well, all right, as long as you take care." Afterwards, Michael discovered that the nephew had asked if he could borrow their car that night. When Michael expressed surprise that she hadn't asked his opinion, Lynette became quite remote and formidable. "You wouldn’t have asked me. I have the right to make decisions too! You wouldn't have said no. What are you fussing about?" Not wanting to spoil the weekend, Michael said she was right and they went out for an enjoyable dinner. But, even as he laughed and joked with Lynette, inside himself he again became aware of a very strong feeling that it would make best sense to end the marriage.

On a hunch, I asked Michael to try and recapture that feeling of it being best to leave the marriage, and to intensify it and see where it took him. He shut his eyes and concentrated and at first he shook his head but then he said, "Something from my childhood that I haven't thought about in years has just popped back into my head!"

What flashed into his mind was a memory from when he was about 10 years old, living in a village in Ireland. He had a friend called Niall who sometimes used to call around to play with Michael and his brothers on the green outside their house. Whenever he came around, Michael recalled, his mother would call her boys in quickly afterwards. Michael would be told to go out and tell his friend Niall that he had better go home because they had jobs to do around the house. It happened so often that, one day, Niall said, "Why is it that, whenever I come down, your mother calls you in?" Michael had no idea so, that day, he asked his mum. She fixed him with a terrifying look and said, "Well, you've enough brothers to play with, haven't you?" Although puzzled by his mother's reasoning, Michael didn't question her authority but was painfully aware that this meant the loss of Niall's friendship. (It was only some years later that Michael learned the real reason for his mother's response: Niall's sister had become pregnant as a teenager and Michael's extremely religious mother thought Niall would be an undesirable influence on her boys.)

"What on earth would not being allowed to play with Niall have to do with my feeling ready to walk out of my marriage?" said Michael, after relating all this. I asked him to stay with the feeling and see where, if anywhere, it took him. "Just the sense that this must have been very embarrassing for me," he replied. I asked him still to remain with the feeling and suddenly, after a few moments, he said he had a strong, almost aggressive feeling of needing to disconnect from Niall. The relationship was not allowed. It was best if it was over.

Michael was surprised. He told me he had thought of his friend Niall many times but had always thought about the embarrassment he must have felt at breaking off the friendship; he had never before accessed the compelling feeling of having to break off the relationship. It had been completely hidden from him. We explored the connection. Michael's mother, a figure of authority, had, in effect, told him that he couldn’t play with Niall, with whom he had been very friendly. Michael and Lynette had been very close on their weekend away and then, suddenly, Lynette had gone into authoritarian mode and started telling him off. On both occasions, a desire for closeness/connection had been threatened by an authority figure. In the incident with Lynette, however, friendship and authority were represented in the same person. As pattern matching is often by its very nature crude, this had been a close enough fit for Michael's emotional brain.

Thus Michael was unconscious that his risk-assessment of his current situation had been based on his previous experience of pain from losing that earlier, desired relationship. As a result, in order not to bring about painful loss again, he became less confrontational with Lynette and
re-established rapport with her. However, having now mitigated the potential pain of the situation, the positive side of the pain–pleasure memory was free to express itself — the seemingly inexplicable aggressive desire to end the relationship, which was a pattern match to that childish feeling all those years ago when carrying out his mother's instruction to tell Niall to go home. (As explained earlier, aggression is a positive or 'approach' emotion that makes us feel powerful and dictatorial.)

When Michael understood that, and could put the experience in context, it stopped occurring. I saw him twice more, and he had felt nothing remotely similar. Indeed, he now felt all the closer to Lynette, even though occasions had occurred when he still experienced her behaviour as over-bearing. He was able to shrug them off.

'Molar memories'
The metaphor of a molar is a useful one for this type of problematic memory. A molar (grinding) tooth, of course, has two roots and a 'molar memory' has two roots; pain and pleasure. If a molar tooth’s roots become infected they have to be exposed or drilled by a dentist, in order to be treated, just as the problematic emotional memory with its two roots has to be exposed to consciousness and treated by being put into context, thereby also ceasing to cause problems. Moreover, if a dentist drills into the wrong root, he does more damage. This is analogous to a therapist who 'explores the pain' of a patient, increasing their suffering, deepening their anxiety or depression when the emotional 'abscess' is located in an unexposed pleasurable emotional root. It doesn’t matter how much 'drilling' a therapist does on the negative root, it will have no impact on the source of the infection when it is in the positive root.

It might perhaps have been CBT's inability to deal with these kinds
of problems that led to the foundation of cognitive analytical therapy (CAT), a fusion of CBT ideas with Freud's psychoanalytical ones. But this has had little, if any, more success, in such situations. With the identification of the pain–pleasure recall principle, however, and its resultant 'molar memories', we have a much more accessible and straight-forward explanation for unconscious emotional conflicts — one that is fully compatible with the empirically based psychological explanations from learning theory. Perhaps even more importantly, though, the insights it brings have the potential to change some troubled lives quickly and permanently.

An important difference
It is important to be clear how molar memories differ from traumas and phobias, which can also blight lives. Traumas and phobias always have excessive fear or anxiety as their core problematical symptom. Molar memories never have fear or anxiety as their core symptom. (Sometimes people with post-traumatic stress disorder present with anger problems, but they are acutely aware that their core problem is their untreated trauma and its associated anxiety.) For molar memories, however, the problematical emotion is always excessive anger or aggressive feelings, or inappropriate expressions of pleasure (all resulting from the 'pleasurable' aspect of the original situation). The individual beset with a molar memory is always blind to the source of these 'pleasurable' emotions since they are screened from consciousness by the negative feelings associated with the memory, as these need to remain conscious for risk assessment purposes. If the risk assessment concludes that it is too dangerous for him or her to express the positive feelings, then these won't enter our conscious awareness at all.

On the other hand, if the risk assessment concludes that it is safe to express the associated positive feelings, then that reaction is reinforced as part of the memory pattern (or template) without the person ever being aware of where the original motivation came from. Indeed, not knowing otherwise, we are likely to argue that our feelings have been aroused by whatever situation we currently find ourselves in. We remain oblivious to their origin in a childhood emotional conflict between clashing needs seeking their fulfilment. (As we are most likely to run into a conflict of emotions during the socialisation phase of childhood, it is during this time that molar memories will most probably be laid down.)

For an animal, molar memories laid down when young may continue to provide appropriate responses in its adulthood. (These responses are, in effect a form of 'learned instinct', a template that will be constantly used to scan the environment for appropriate pattern-matching stimuli.) But, because our lives are infinitely more complex and the circumstances we experience infinitely more varied than those experienced by early mammals, what gets filed away is not necessarily an appropriate reaction at all on many of the crudely similar occasions which, to the emotional brain, are an accurate pattern match.

Context is the key
So we are usually completely unaware of what is now maladaptive
conditioning and, because we are unaware, we are condemned to repeat it endlessly. For, even though we know it isn’t routine behaviour to get incensed over virtually nothing or to have an overwhelming urge to walk out on a happy marriage, we tend to justify such reactions to ourselves. "Well, she is so annoying at times that it is no surprise I sometimes feel livid with her." "Everyone wants to feel accepted." "He always knows how to press my buttons. It isn’t my fault I react like this." As a result, there is nothing to tell us that there is a better way to behave. (After all, we are still surviving, so it must be 'working'.) But, when we have knowledge of the pain–pleasure recall process, we can update our molar memory conditioning.

If, as described, we stay with the feeling, when we experience an over-the-top or inexplicable reaction, we can pick up on its source. Merely recognising and acknowledging it consciously is enough for the hippocampus (a brain organ concerned with conscious memories) to be able to identify it as belonging to the past, with no further relevance for future action. Creating context serves to undo the maladaptive programming. For, it is when an emotion (and ensuing action) is unconscious that it is stripped of any context. It becomes a universal application working purely by association or pattern matching. But, if the inappropriate emotion can be activated and the original memory brought back, then context can be created for it. It is no longer universal and it is deactivated. The unconscious programming element of the molar memory vanishes and so ceases to influence our behaviour.

Overcoming anorexia
While I was still experimenting with this theory, I happened to receive a call from a 38-year-old woman called Catherine, who had struggled with anorexia since she was 13. I had seen her for therapy 15 years before, and we had managed to find ways to help her cope but had never cracked the anorexia itself. Her weight fell, at one point, to four and a half stones and she was still painfully thin when I met her this time around.

She had got back in touch because her obsessive-compulsive behaviours around food were worsening again. During the intervening years since I'd last seen her, she had had all different kinds of therapy, including hospitalisation, none of which had really helped. Just recently she had seen a hypnotherapist who had regressed her to a time when she was a very young girl, sitting in her room, hearing her parents arguing about the fact that she had soiled herself yet again. There had been a lot of arguing when she was young about her inability — or refusal — to control her bowels. She recalled feeling sadness that her parents were fighting again and that it was her fault. Catherine told me she had cried a lot when she relived this memory, and felt some relief. However, this was already a highly familiar memory for her, and reliving it didn't seem to help her in any way afterwards.

I wondered if she might have experienced some other emotion, more significant than the sadness, that she wasn't aware of right then. So, with her permission, I asked her to close her eyes and go back to that time when she was in the room. I asked her questions about the colour of the walls and the furniture in the room, to help her get fully back into the experience. Then I said to her, "What are you feeling now in your body?" And she said, “I feel I can't hold on any more. I have to let go." "How does that feel?" "One part of me doesn't want to let go," she said, "but the other part does and it feels

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© Joe Griffin (2006)

This article is a revised version of an article which first appeared in Volume 13, No, 3 (2006) of the Human Givens journal.

JOE GRIFFIN is a psychotherapist who, with IVAN TYRRELL developed the human givens approach.

This article appears in the new human givens book An Idea In Practice: using the human givens approach

Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard

Return to top

Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard

This article appears in the new human givens book An Idea In Practice: using the human givens approach

Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard

Return to top

This article appears in the new human givens book An Idea In Practice: using the human givens approach

Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard